Slum Tourism and the Consumption of Poverty in TripAdvisor Reviews: The Cases of Langa, Dharavi and Santa Marta

Abstract

This chapter examines one of the ways in which pervasive stereotypes of the global south as a place of poverty, unemployment and economic subsistence are maintained and contested in the media of the global north. Focusing on TripAdvisor reviews of “slum” tours in three locations — namely, Langa in Cape Town, Dharavi in Mumbai, and Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro — it explores how poverty is narrated as a natural feature of these tourist destinations, and how low-income communities and lifestyles are commoditized for and by the gaze of the west as an “authentic” adventure experience. The chapter explores aspects of globalized consumer culture that exist at the level involving the most obviously poor and systematically exploited groups who subsist at the “bottom” of globalized consumer culture, in a touristic practice that brings the haves into an encounter (mediated by tour guides and media culture) with the have-nots, in a setting in which the complexities of development, privilege and its lack, quality of life and leisure are laid bare. Although slum tourism and media coverage about it undeniably adds to the aestheticization and commoditization of poverty, another layer of representation is also at play. This involves the perpetuation of old stereotypes of the global south as a place of poverty, in which people struggle to survive (where this struggle is defined partly by access to consumer opportunities taken for granted in the global north), and their challenging by counterdiscourses which seek to make legible the forms of agency and consumerist modernity coexisting with that poverty.